Asian Englishes

Beyond the Canon

Braj B. Kachru

Publication Year: 2005

This book provides crucial reading for students and researchers of world Englishes. It is an insightful and provocative study of the forms and functions of English in Asia, its acculturation and nativization, and the innovative dimensions of Asian creativity.

Cover

Title Page, Copyright Page

Contents

List of illustrations

Series editor’s preface

A new book from Professor Braj B. Kachru is nothing less than an event. The
contribution of Braj Kachru to linguistics and English studies over the last three
decades has been legendary. That academics today routinely talk about the
‘Englishes’ of the world is due in no small measure to the fact that when Braj
Kachru ...

Preface

This book is essentially about the Asianness in Asian Englishes and their
gradual, yet marked, distinctness which has developed over a long history in
contexts of language and cultural contact. It discusses the changing ideational
and functional constructs of the presence of the English language in the Asian
continent ...

Acknowledgements

The following chapters in this volume are revised, updated, and in some cases
substantially rewritten versions of papers published earlier. The original titles
have been altered to bring a thematic cohesiveness to this volume, and relevant
latest references have been added. These papers first appeared in the sources
listed below. ...

1. Introduction: Anglophone Asia

The volume, Asian Englishes: Beyond the Canon, contextualizes selected
dimensions of world Englishes in Asia’s Anglophone societies. The ten chapters
that follow bring together various perspectives on functions, creativity,
canonicity, attitudes and pedagogy. ...

Part I: Contexts

2. Asian Englishes

The issues that I discuss in this chapter concern several aspects of the Asian
presence of the English language, and are not restricted to methods and
methodology. The concerns are about the constructs of the language that we
use in a wide range of functional domains, about the ideologies, and the
altered ...

3. South Asian schizophrenia

The history of English in South Asia is one of prolonged heated debates and
controversies. The controversy about the legacy of English and desirability of
its continued location in language policies and its cultural associations is the
major pastime of politicians, academics and the media. However, the political
map of ...

4. Past imperfect: The Japanese agony

This chapter primarily focuses on Japan, which holds a unique position in Asia,
and provides important insights for understanding various methodological,
attitudinal, and ideological issues about the functions of English and attitudes
towards the language. In the East Asian region Japan has been one of the first
countries ...

Part II: Convergence

5. Englishization: Asia and beyond

The focus of this chapter is on one of the two Janus-like faces of language
contact situations involving English and other languages termed
ENGLISHIZATION. This is an aspect that has received considerable attention in
recent years (e.g. see Viereck and Bald, 1986, for references). The other face
is that of nativization ...

6. The absent voices

This chapter discusses English for Specific Purposes (hereafter ESP) primarily
within the context of Anglophone Asia. In most studies on ESP, the focus is
generally on the appropriateness of a language corpus: the formal organization
of the corpus at various linguistic levels: phonetic, phonological (e.g. Flood
and West, 1952); ...

Part III: Mantras

7. Medium and mantra

This chapter contextualizes Raja Rao’s Kanthapura, published in 1938, within
what is now the canon of Indian English creativity. In fact, Rao’s Kanthapura
provided a liberating mantra in the formative years of the creativity in Asia’s
Indian English. In this chapter, I will place that mantra in a broader historical
context and ...

8. Talking back and writing back

In its genre, that of face-to-face interviews, Interviews with Writers of the Post-
Colonial World is rewarding, stimulating, and extremely informative.1 The
team of two skilful interviewers, Jussawalla and Dasenbrock (hereafter, J and
D), have made this fine book a resource for both scholars of language and
literature ...

Part IV: Predator

9. Killer or accessory to murder?

The tenor of this chapter is partly indicative of the global gravity and the
current tone of international debate on this topic of language death and decay.
We are witnessing in South Asia, in East Asia, in Africa, and indeed across all
the continents, escalating critical stages of endangerment, decay, and
ultimately, ...

Part V: Pedagogy

10. Contexts of pedagogy and identity

In recent years there have been insightful initiatives in English pedagogy. These
initiatives go beyond earlier essentially Western — British and North American
— paradigms of methodology, teacher education, and models of acquisition.
A variety of questions have been raised about the underlying constructs1 of
such earlier research ...

Part VI: Afterword

11. Present tense: Making sense of Anglophone Asia

This afterword recapitulates the major threads of present formal, functional
and ideational tensions of Anglophone Asia — a region which is now home
to the world’s largest English-using population. In literature a variety of
constructs are used to ‘interrogate’ — or ‘problematize’ — the presence of
English in Asia, ...

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